Inside the penal voluntary sector: Divided discourses of “helping” criminalized women

Abstract

Neoliberal austerity measures and welfare state retrenchment have meant that voluntary organizations around the globe are increasingly called upon to perform statutory social services. Despite a large and rising presence in criminal justice service delivery, volunteers and voluntary organizations have scarcely received scholarly analysis. This paper uses interviews, ethnography, and document analysis to explore the penal voluntary sector in Canada. Specifically, how individuals in the penal voluntary sector understand their roles in helping criminalized women and how these perspectives vary across different positions. This paper illuminates how agents occupying different helper positions cultivate divergent understandings of (and justifications for) the help they provide. Bourdieu’s field theory is mobilized to demonstrate how variegated discourses of helping co-exist, conflict, and impact the relational dynamics of the penal voluntary sector and its engagement with criminalized women.

Keywords

Canada criminalized women discourse field positions field theory helping others penal voluntary sector voluntary sector

As long as there have been prisons, there have been people who are concerned for the welfare of prisoners. (Correctional Service Canada, 2013: p. 3)

Introduction

Neoliberal austerity measures and the (near) global retrenchment of welfare state protections have increasingly pushed statutory social services onto voluntary organizations (Hall et al., 2003; Mills et al., 2011). This is especially true of criminal justice contexts wherein processes of carceral devolution (Miller, 2014) and/or governing-at-a-distance (Garland, 2001; Rose and Miller, 1992) have accentuated the longstanding role of volunteers (e.g. Maurutto, 2003). Despite their large and rising presence in criminal justice service delivery, volunteers and voluntary organizations have scarcely received scholarly analysis (exceptions: Kaufman, 2015; Miller, 2014; Quirouette, 2018; Tomczak, 2016). The voluntary sector is girded by a potent mythos of benevolence that discourages close scrutiny and criticism (Armstrong, 2002). Yet, this sector—like other institutions—is entwined within existing social systems, steeped in their structural and material realities. As such, penal voluntary organizations are “more complicated, troubling and full of potential than scholars have opined thus far” (Tomczak, 2016: p. 2).

This paper investigates how individuals in the penal voluntary sector understand their roles in helping criminalized women and how these perspectives vary across different positions. Though individuals may share aspirations of helping criminalized women, how they “choose to engage in the helping agenda” (Fenton, 2015: p. 1427; see also McNeill et al., 2009) varies across diversely situated field positions. Mobilizing Bourdieu, this paper aims to illustrate how agents occupying different positions—volunteers, paid practitioners, and “professional exes”¹—draw on variegated discourses of helping as they contend (and collaborate) over the help criminalized women need and who is best positioned to offer it.

The penal voluntary sector (PVS)

The PVS encompasses the variety of non-profit, non-statutory organizations (as well as individuals and groups) that support criminalized individuals, their families, and victims (Tomczak, 2016). Research on this sector can predominantly be summarized as encompassing: (i) marketization, (ii) “net widening”, and (iii) boundary work literatures. Marketization literature points to policy developments and neoliberal projects that have placed the voluntary sector at the forefront of penal service delivery (e.g. Maguire, 2012). Net widening literature is concerned with how control and punishment are extended through (and by) the voluntary sector (e.g. Cohen, 1985; Foucault, 1995). Boundary work literature frames the voluntary sector’s support and service delivery as distinctive, embodying a particular ethos of rehabilitation in contrast to the “correction” offered by state agents (e.g. Corcoran and Grotz, 2016; Tomczak and Albertson, 2016). These well-worn (but narrow) lines of inquiry have stifled our understanding of the PVS (Hucklesby and Corcoran, 2016; Tomczak, 2016).

In other substantive areas, the path forward has been to highlight penal variation (e.g. Barker, 2009; Goodman et al., 2017; Hannah-Moffat, 2005; Lynch, 2011). For example, Miller (2014) argues that prisoner re-entry is a “political project” between various stakeholders (e.g. human service professionals, criminal justice agencies, policy and program planners) who each have their own “specific goals, conceptualize prisoners in specific ways, and advocate for specific kinds of interventions in former prisoners’ lives” (p. 307). I seek to amplify this sentiment by exploring variation within one such stakeholder group: the PVS.

Theoretical framework

A field is “a semi-autonomous, relatively bounded sphere of action in which people, groups, and organizations struggle with and against each other” (Page, 2013: p. 2). Bourdieu’s field theory has a rich history in punishment and society scholarship (e.g. Goodman et al., 2017;Page, 2011, 2013) as well as research on helping others (e.g. Schneiderhan, 2015). Combining these areas, this paper mobilizes Bourdieu’s approach to offer a preliminary conceptualization of the penal voluntary field in which diverse agents (e.g. individuals, groups, organizations) are oriented toward helping criminalized individuals through non-profit, non-statutory intervention. Field analyses typically begin by outlining the central or organizing conflict(s) (e.g. Goodman et al., 2017). However, fields also require consensus and social integration (Savage and Silva, 2013)—an agreement about “what is going on” (Fligstein and McAdam, 2011: p. 4). Mapping the contours of the penal voluntary field requires, inter alia, the investigation of: how and when this field developed, its key positions and their habitus, the stakes of the core conflict(s), the boundaries of field consensus, types and distribution of capital, and the relationships between overlapping fields.

As a first step, this paper explores the penal voluntary field’s key positions, as well as their requisite capital, resultant habitus, and relational dynamics. Field positions are “determined by the agent’s amount and composition of capital”, with each offering “certain (and not other) paths of actions” (Page, 2013: p. 3). In the analysis that follows, I rely on the organizational distinctions between volunteers, paid staff practitioners, and professional exes for guidance in this preliminary mapping of key positions. These classifications are used in an ideal-typical fashion, and thus their principal value is as theoretical abstractions rather than empirical generalizations (Weber, 1949). Clarifying this, Bourdieu draws a distinction between empiric and epistemic individuals, the latter invoking field position (Bourdieu, 1988: p. 23). Accordingly, there is an important difference between my research participants as unique individuals and the analytical constructs (volunteer, practitioner, and professional ex field positions) I use to understand their behavior and perspectives. The purpose of drawing such conceptual distinctions is to provide a “theoretical space of differentiation” (Bourdieu, 1988: p. 23) and a set of heuristic tools (Weber, 1949) through which to navigate the muddled terrain of empirical work and data analysis in the PVS.

Bourdieu is especially concerned with how the concepts of field, capital, and habitus coalesce as “practice” or action. Though this study was designed to illuminate individuals’ perceptions rather than their practice, understanding the latter requires uncovering the discursive presuppositions (Gross, 2009) and interpretive schemes through which it is filtered (Schutz, 1967). This infusion of discourse and action is accounted for in the phenomenological and pragmatist intellectual traditions. Borrowing from Schutz (1967), I define action as “projected behavior” (p. 62). Action already exists “in project” in our reflective consciousnesses; it is realized through rather than produced by practice (Schutz, 1967). Practice is not merely an outward performance but “include[s] cognitive and even affective layers” (Berger and Luckman, 1967: p. 94). As Joas (1996) explains “even when we are not pursuing any immediate intention of action, the world exists…in the form of possible actions” (p. 158). Discourse analysis operates to uncover these cognitive projects, revealing practice in its future-perfect tense (Schutz, 1967). Field agents think about what it means to help criminalized women prior to their interactions with them. They imagine: I will have helped criminalized women. This paper investigates how such discursive understandings are sedimented according to field positions as a lens through which to gain insight into PVS practice.

Data and methods

Ethnography: Over 400 hours of field observations were completed in seven voluntary organizations across Canada from 2013 to 2018. These organizations had (paid and unpaid) workforces of between 5 and 35; were predominantly secular (n = 5); and offered services to criminalized women prior to sentencing, throughout their incarceration, and after their release. Programming and services spanned: individual mentorship, legal advocacy, drug/alcohol treatment, anger management, family visitation, community reintegration support, parenting classes, and crisis counseling. Research sites were purposively sampled to differ across key dimensions of organizational variability: size, funding, services offered, population served, and religious affiliation (see: Tomczak, 2016). While variation was important, field sites were ultimately determined by each organization’s openness to my research agenda and frequent presence in their offices. Contact was initiated through emails and phone calls to volunteer coordinators, executive directors, and/or administrators. Throughout this process, I greatly benefited from existing networks established during previous volunteer work.²

I observed and participated alongside 24 participants in three primary contexts: (i) volunteer and new staff training, (ii) scheduled volunteer shifts, and (iii) the daily work of paid staff. Fieldnotes were recorded by hand throughout and later typed. My sample includes: 14 volunteers, 7 practitioners, and 3 professional exes. While not gathered in a representative manner, these proportions matched what I observed in the field: organizations typically had more volunteers than paid staff and professional exes were limited in number. All participants were women, which is unsurprising given the gendered division of labor across the helping professions (Hall et al., 2003: p. 68) and the discourses of “women helping women” prevalent in the post Creating Choices era of gender responsive punishment (more below). My participants self-identified as white (n = 13), black (n = 8), and Indigenous (n = 3). Pseudonyms have been used throughout.

Interviews: Fieldwork was triangulated by semi-structured interviews with 15 of the 24 participants I observed. The remaining nine individuals preferred not to be formally interviewed and/or could not arrange a time to do so. Interviews covered four themes: (i) organizational roles; (ii) goals, expectations, and assumptions; (iii) relationships with others in the organization; and (iv) the role of material, cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal resources in daily routines and beliefs. With the exception of one interview conducted in December 2014, all interviews were conducted on a one-on-one basis between September 2017 and January 2018 outside of participants’ respective organizations. Each interview lasted approximately 60 minutes, was tape recorded, and transcribed.

Thematic analysis of transcripts and fieldnotes was completed in Dedoose by inductively generating codes in open, axial, and selective phases (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). During open coding, I read through the entirety of my data creating working descriptions of what I saw happening. In later phases, I fleshed out the relationships between these descriptions.

Throughout this iterative process, the core ideas—how to help criminalized women, who knows best, and why—emerged. To refine these ideas, I re-read and re-coded my data selectively through these lenses.

Document analysis: In addition, I completed qualitative analysis of 63 theoretically sampled job advertisements posted by penal voluntary organizations across Canada. My sample represents the jobs posted on relevant organizational websites in September 2017 and May 2019. Documents from both periods were combined and coded by job titles, eligibility requirements, and professional duties, as well as hours and salary (where applicable). Later, advertisements were sorted according to field positions (36 advertisements for practitioners, 26 for volunteers, and 1 for a professional ex). In addition, incoming call records (n = 218), kept by volunteers at one organization over a five-month period in 2017, were reviewed and coded according to the purpose of the call and the action taken.

Research context

The PVS in Canada (see also: Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat, 2016; Salole, 2016) includes organizations of varying size and scope, providing: parenting classes, drug/alcohol counseling, library programs and writing classes, religious guidance, volunteer mentorship, family visitation, court programs, and more. The PVS for criminalized women in Canada is predominantly organized around the Creating Choices report. This report—authored by the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women and co-chaired by a representative from the PVS—was Correctional Service Canada’s response to enduring controversies surrounding the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario.

Creating Choices envisioned a new direction in women’s imprisonment exemplifying: empowerment, meaningful and responsible choices, respect and dignity, a supportive environment, and shared responsibility (Correctional Service Canada, 1990). These reform efforts have been declared a modest success in the most recent review (Barrett et al., 2010) and continue to animate the PVS’s support of criminalized women in Canada. However, as Joas (1996) reminds us, “the relationship between the purpose of [an] organization and the motivation of the members can take on very different forms” (p. 150). Differently situated agents in the PVS will variably interpret such policy priorities as they translate them into tangible help for criminalized women.

Helping positions: Volunteer, practitioner, and professional ex perspectives

As individuals across the helping professions (e.g. social work, the voluntary sector) seek to help others, they must “make sense of personal and social situations in terms of their idiosyncratic constructs, professional ideologies, formal job descriptions and current preoccupations” (Clare, 1988: p. 492), in addition to—as I will demonstrate—the logic(s) of their particular field. Across volunteer, practitioner, and professional ex field positions, agents agreed that: their work was important and intrinsically worthwhile; criminalized women need, deserve, and want help from the voluntary sector; and intervention by the PVS can make a positive difference.

Agents struggled with one another to define field priorities—the kind of help to offer and the “locus of ‘expert’ practice” (Clare, 1988: p. 493)—by mobilizing competing discourses to describe the help they offered. In the next sections, I describe how agents across these three positions envisioned themselves as helping criminalized women,³ noting the forms of capital they relied on to legitimate their expertise and the field dynamics that emerged in the process. Recalling Bourdieu’s (1988) distinction between the empiric and the epistemic, what follows is neither an analysis nor a critique of individual perspectives, but rather an illustration of the observed affinity between agents’ field positions and their particular discourses of helping.

Volunteers

“Call(s) for Volunteers”, periodically posted on voluntary organizations’ websites, were the most common recruitment pathway for volunteers in this field. Available posts offered opportunities in: “special events”, “social media”, “legal advocacy”, “program resources”, “youth mentorship”, “fundraising”, “office administration”, “prison visitation”, and the “one-on-one support [of] clients”. Requirements included: 8 hours of service per month, six-month minimum commitment, business-hours availability, access to transit, and professional dress. Volunteers in my sample were typically white women in their 20s, with ambitions (or achievement) of postsecondary education, and (at research commencement) had an average of five months experience working with criminalized women. The majority of volunteers I observed were university students looking to fulfill course requirements or gain experience for future employment. Most volunteers completed weekly or biweekly shifts. Though there was considerable variation in their responsibilities, all participants were “hired” to complete a specific task and were not permitted to help in other capacities.

When volunteers were hired, they underwent induction training that ranged from shadowing a practitioner for a few hours to multi-day small group affairs. Volunteer handbooks, often distributed during training, served as cogent examples of how the position was constructed in this field:

A volunteer must be dependable; if you commit yourself to a program, you must be willing to follow through. Offenders have been let down in the past, so if you make promises, be prepared to keep them.

Volunteers must be stable persons themselves. Persons who become involved in such work should be people who have worked out or overcome their own problems. Persons who have unsolved problems (family, drugs, alcohol, etc.) themselves, will likely have trouble helping others […] (Fisher, n.d.).

Though the application criteria and training process was stringent, once “in” volunteers were not held accountable in the ways that training materials (as above) suggested. For example, almost every volunteer I observed missed multiple shifts, sometimes without notice. Yet, in spite of strict attendance policies, volunteers were not reprimanded for such absences (fieldnotes November 2014, December 2017). The management staff at these voluntary organizations may have been disappointed with such unreliability, but they were not in a position to admonish this behavior as “levels of funding for many organizations [has] declined—in some cases dramatically—while the need and demand for services [has] increased” (Hall et al., 2005: p. 23). As a result, voluntary organizations are increasingly dependent on the service of volunteers (Bielefeld, 1994; Hall et al., 2003; McMurty et al., 1991) and at the mercy of their (limited) availability and/or commitment.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the (above) handbook’s characterological description, volunteers primarily understood themselves as role models for criminalized women.

Danielle: (fieldnotes July 2017) Volunteers are here to help show [criminalized women] the way […] we can help them imagine different futures for themselves by showing them what is possible.

Laura: Volunteers need to model what good and respectful relationships look like […] I think that’s the best thing a volunteer can do […]

Volunteers’ discursive constructions of themselves as role models were paired with aspirations of a particular kind of “helping relationship” with service users, one that was based on “connect[ing] with them … show[ing] concern, build[ing] a comfort level, and develop[ing] trust” (fieldnotes September 2017). In imagining such a mentorship relationship, volunteers underscored their own importance as guides facilitating service users’ reform. They envisioned themselves as fixers (Tomczak and Buck, 2019), leaning on their educational capital as they defined the nature of criminalized women’s needs and the scope of suitable interventions.

Natalia: […] I try to triage the situation. What does she need right now? What are her most pressing problems? What can I do about those things in the time I have? […] Taking lots of different courses helps with this a lot I think … You never know when something is going to spark your memory about something you learned years ago and that’s going to make the difference between helping someone and not.

Other participants variously emphasized their (under)graduate and professional training, enrollment in specific academic courses, and/or continued learning via activities like reading the newspaper, listening to podcasts, and consuming self-help material as they sought to define field priorities (fieldnotes March 2018).

Laura: I’ve taken courses that teach you about bias in the media … about the way that different kinds of people tend to be portrayed […] I feel I have a more balanced perspective of [criminalized women] as a result.

Charlene: (fieldnotes February 2018) Education is the most important thing … I use the things I’ve learned over the years in my personal studies to empathize with these women […]

Volunteers also believed that the unpaid nature of their work positioned their helping interventions as more honorable, legitimate, and/or autonomous than others (see also: Schneiderhan, 2015). As Buck (2018) describes, there is a problematic assumption that “to be ‘genuine’ implies you must also be selfless in professional or monetary terms” (p. 196).⁴

Terry: (fieldnotes November 2017) I’ve got nothing invested here besides helping these women.

Katherine: The biggest difference I see between volunteers and the practitioners is that they get paid and we don’t. They’re part of the whole [criminal justice] system […] you can’t overlook where their pay day is coming from […]

Amelia: (fieldnotes October 2014) Every time that I come in it’s with an open heart and good intentions.

These assertions follow a logic of “help for help’s sake” that has long animated narratives of benevolence in the voluntary sector (Schneiderhan, 2015: p. 226).

Taken together, volunteers’ educational capital and (perceived) altruism constructed their expertise in this field. However, despite advocating that they knew best, volunteers ultimately refracted accountability for reform back onto service users through responsibilizing discourses.

Laura: We need to help [criminalized women] in ways that they can carry forward with them on their own because we can’t be there 24/7 all the time.

Michelle: […] [empowerment is] exactly what women need. We need to learn to empower ourselves.

Such dispositions towards helping involve what Hannah-Moffat (2005) refers to as the continuation and re-imagination of old rehabilitative ideals, in which emphasis is placed on personal change and responsibility over social-structural determinants (e.g. Bosworth, 2007; Lynch, 2000). These discourses were absorbed, transfigured, and corroborated by personal experience at the individual level (see also: Cheliotis, 2006).

For example, in describing their backgrounds, volunteers articulated few barriers to success and a confident approach to their future (fieldnotes February 2018). Embodying a kind of ecological (or reverse) fallacy, volunteers re-told stories of their own life success as a function of having followed the kind of principles advocated by the welfarist organizations they worked for. They relied on their own life experiences to help service users construct what Ward and Brown (2004) call a “good life”. Volunteers’ habitus, then, involved selecting personal stories to legitimate and advance a perspective of empowerment, characterological change, and taking responsibility for one’s own life trajectory.⁵

Volunteers drew on their personal experiences (and life lessons) as they constructed themselves as role models and offered advice to service users. They reproduced a particular discursive frame of hard work and conscientiousness: social myths that can be traced back to the earliest debates on poverty and responsibility. These stories of hard work and “inevitable” reward often neglected important differences between volunteers and service users. The latter actively navigated the stigma of a criminal record (Pager, 2003), and often also racism, alongside other intersecting social disadvantages.

Though volunteers envisioned themselves as role models for criminalized women—wherein they defined priorities, offered solutions, and encouraged meaningful life changes—such aspirations were not always realized in practice. In certain interactions, volunteers “felt inadequate … like [they] didn’t help” or expressed “feelings of incompetence about not being able to help” (fieldnotes July 2017). This was especially true when there was a disjuncture between the help volunteers’ thought they would offer—“help” in its future perfect tense (Schutz, 1967)—and their lived reality in the field. For example, in 83% of phone calls with service users (n = 182), volunteers who were hired to provide emotional support over the phone performed solely administrative tasks. Such tasks included: transferring the phone call to someone else, offering basic information about organizational programming, and providing the phone numbers of other organizations. While such tasks are essential to the running of organizations and important to service users, volunteers with these experiences expressed disappointment about their level of engagement with criminalized women (fieldnotes August 2017). For example, Katherine did not feel like she was contributing in the way she imagined she would be (fieldnotes January 2018).

Yet, from a field-level perspective, the completion of such administrative tasks was especially helpful. Changing funding priorities has meant that support for the voluntary sector is increasingly unpredictable, short-term, and highly competitive (Hall et al., 2005). Of the available funding, very little is allocated toward administrative tasks that “support overall organizational capacity” (Hall et al., 2005: v). As a result, voluntary organizations are increasingly dependent on volunteers to fill these gaps (Bielefeld, 1994; Hall et al., 2003; McMurty et al., 1991). However, these financial minutiae were not communicated to volunteers, which may have encouraged misinterpretations and conflict between field positions. Katherine, for example, assumed that practitioners gave her “mundane” administrative tasks because they doubted her ability to help criminalized women in meaningful ways (fieldnotes November 2017). From volunteers’ perspectives, tasks were distributed according to authority, with practitioners—who occupied higher status positions—having the first pick of the more desirable ways of helping (e.g. running programming or engaging face-to-face with service users). In the next section, I explore these assumptions, illustrating how practitioners envisioned themselves as helpers and the discourses they relied upon to legitimate their work.

Practitioners

Job titles for practitioner vacancies included: “Transition House Worker”, “Community Inclusion Support Worker”, “Counsellor”, “Program Coordinator”, “Program Facilitator”, and “Addictions Support Worker”. Required skills and/or qualifications across job postings included: “a diploma or university degree” combined with “field experience” (n = 33), “cultural competency” (n = 25), a “knowledge of and/or ability to work with diverse clients who have a variety of complex needs” (n = 22), “knowledge related to addictions and mental health” (n = 21), a “gender-informed” and/or “feminist” approach (n = 14), “knowledge of relevant legislation and policies” and/or “government services” (n = 14), “knowledge of community resources” (n = 12), a “working knowledge of the justice system” (n = 7), “socially inclusive practice” (n = 4), a “person-centred” approach (n = 1), and “knowledge of and respect for Indigenous traditions and culture” (n = 1). The typical job posting advertised an hourly wage of $15–30 for full and part-time positions.

Practitioners in my sample were typically women of color in their 30s, with Bachelor’s degrees, and (at research commencement) an average of 29 months of experience working with criminalized women. They occupied a variety of roles in voluntary organizations, including, inter alia: running programming (e.g. counseling, parenting, drug and alcohol use, anger management, and employment), meeting with service users one-on-one, hiring and training volunteers, and applying for grant funding. Most practitioners I observed spent a minority of their time in their organizational offices. Instead, they juggled appointments with women in the community and/or commuted to local correctional facilities (fieldnotes December 2014, October 2017).

Practitioners had a frequent and consistent presence in this field that enabled them to cultivate their habitus or “feel for the game” (Bourdieu, 1990: p. 66). For example, Karen and Gabrielle drew connections between their helping perspectives and the time they spent interacting with criminalized women on a day-to-day basis:

Karen: (fieldnotes September 2017) […] I had to learn from [criminalized women] first before I could even think about helping them … I first had to understand their needs.

Gabrielle: The more time you spend with these women, the more complicated it all becomes […] it’s easy to see the stuff on the surface … it takes a real commitment to see why.

In contrast to volunteers who tended to express certainty about the nature of criminalized women’s “problems” and the best path to a solution, practitioners were much less likely to provide definitive “answers” about how to help.

Emily: It’s hard to know what to do for [criminalized women]. The longer you spend trying to help and getting to know them, the more obvious it becomes that the problems they face are in a lot of ways too big to tackle […] and so it’s really important to realize the weight of that all on the women we try to help … I don’t think many volunteers really get that … they think that you can try and hope to get the women to change their behavior but a lot of the time it’s just too much to ask […]

Gabrielle: (fieldnotes January 2018) Staff here … they just get worn down … everyone comes in optimistic … thinking that they’ll be the one to turn someone’s life around, but then at some point we’re all smacked in the face with reality […] You learn to cope with your own smallness compared to [criminalized women’s] problems. If there’s a way to help better I just don’t know it … maybe you need to get a bunch of degrees to figure it out (laughing).

Practitioners’ reluctance to provide a “straightforward answer” when asked about how to help criminalized women, may be best understood as a concerted effort to highlight the multiplicity of service users’ needs which made it “difficult to pin down cause and effect” (Hood, 2015: pp. 144–145). It was challenging for practitioners “to figure out both what [was] going on and what the best response [was]” (Jansen, 2018: p. 1532), which may have contributed to the uncertainty they expressed.

As seekers after meaning, practitioners tried to adopt service users’ points of view, suggesting “the client knows best what is wrong, what needs to be explored and what has to be done” (Howe, 2016 as cited in Tomczak and Buck, 2019: p. 11). In their interactions with criminalized women, practitioners adopted a receptive listening stance—often repeating the adage “you have two ears and one mouth for a reason” (fieldnotes October 2014, December 2017). It was important to practitioners that they developed a rich portrait of service users’ needs. A phrase frequently repeated across diverse voluntary organizations was: “women are not women who are incarcerated, they are …”. Individual practitioners would put their own spin on the phrase’s ending, variably adding: “mothers”, “daughters”, “neighbors”, “professionals”, among other statuses (fieldnotes October 2014, January 2018).

Practitioners were cautious when interpreting the behaviors of criminalized women, defining helping priorities, and proposing interventions. They noted that misinterpretations could “pathologize and shame [service users]”, “interfere with [their] effective support” and “dismiss [service users’] survival adaptations” (fieldnotes November 2017). Practitioners strived to “meet criminalized women where they were at”, suggesting that it was their responsibility to “move towards her perspective, not the other way around” (fieldnotes August 2014, emphasis in original). Practitioners were impassioned advocates of this approach to helping and I observed them correct volunteers’ dissimilar perspectives—simultaneously attempting to control the field’s discourses and assert their position.

Tasia: (fieldnotes September 2017, speaking to a volunteer) You have a lot of assumptions or things you want for her … but you can’t do that. This is her life. What you are doing is controlling her. You can’t walk in here and decide what is best. You need to hang back. Learn from her.

Karen: (fieldnotes October 2017, speaking to volunteers) Don’t think that you need to find the answer […] just putting someone in the right direction with resources is helpful. You don’t necessarily need to “do” something … [the] most important thing to do is listen […] all [service users] need is to be acknowledged as a human being.

These different understandings of helping sometimes amounted to conflict between practitioners and volunteers. For example, Shauna critiqued volunteers’ perspectives and expressed skepticism over their role in helping criminalized women.

Shauna: Volunteers don’t stick around here for long. They desperately want to feel helpful and they’re just so sure about what the problem is. They have the solution because they took this class or read that book. If it’s not just like they imagine they get frustrated and leave.

Here, Shauna blended a critique of volunteers’ use of their educational capital, their approach to helping, and their transient position in the field in order to undermine their authority.

The call records I examined lend preliminary support to practitioners’ perception that their approach to helping is experienced as preferable by service users. For example, service users sometimes called organizations multiple times per day in an attempt to speak with practitioners, despite the phone line being maintained by volunteers who were trained in crisis support, available, and eager to help.

“Asked to be transferred to [practitioner A] for a third time so informed caller she was unavailable. Asked to be transferred to [practitioner B]” (Volunteer Call Log, July 2017). “Called a third time and asked to clarify [practitioner C] and [practitioner D’s] schedules. I offered to speak with her personally, but she wanted to be transferred to [practitioner C]” (Volunteer Call Log, August 2017).

In fact, service users were documented as asking for a direct line to practitioners’ office phones to avoid going through the main phone line run by volunteers (July 2017, August 2017). More strikingly, in 57% (n = 124) of the calls answered by volunteers, service users requested to be immediately transferred to practitioners. This may have been for a number of reasons, including that practitioners typically had: more experience working within the criminal justice system, a more consistent presence in the field, and more established relationships with service users. However, this may also be associated with the divergent ways in which volunteers and practitioners conceptualized their helping roles. In the next section, I examine a third approach to helping that was utilized by professional exes who occupied simultaneous (and shifting) field positions.

Professional exes

Professional ex positions—sometimes called “peer mentors” (Buck, 2018)—are not typically advertised in the way that volunteer and practitioner positions are. My job searches returned only one advertised position explicitly seeking professional exes.⁶ The job title for this position was “Peer Support Worker” and the contract was for 8 hours per week. Applicants were required to have previously been service users at this organization, successfully having completed the community program that they would be working for. The duties of this position included: “provid[ing] peer support”, “co-develop[ing] … peer support activities”, as well as “schedule[ing] and co-ordinat[ing] peer support activities”. Applicants were prohibited from being on parole and must have “be[en] released from prison for a minimum of 1 year”. Responsibilizing language was used throughout the advertisement: “applicants must have stable housing, income and medical care” and “must be able to be at work on a consistent basis with regular attendance and punctuality, and be willing and able to handle all the duties and responsibilities of this position on an ongoing basis”. The combined features of pre-existing financial stability and part-time hours suggest that the professional ex position is designed to be auxiliary employment.

Due to small sample size (n = 3), the characterization of the professional ex position that follows is largely provisional. Professional exes in my sample were typically women of color, without postsecondary education, who had concurrent employment elsewhere, and (at research commencement) had worked with criminalized women for seven months on average. They were all internally recruited to paid positions once they had completed organizational programming as service users and displayed particular “promise” or “potential” (fieldnotes November 2014). Participants were employed in a number of roles in voluntary organizations, most often running programming for criminalized women, acting as mentors, or as guest speakers at volunteer training sessions. While a history of incarceration was necessary for this position, it was not sufficient. As Buck (2018) explains “it is not just the presence of any peer engaging on positive, or person-centred terms which is important to this work, but a peer who is able to employ a number of conditions” (p. 192). Professional exes must demonstrate a particular habitus towards helping those who have been similarly stigmatized by the criminal justice system (LeBel, 2007; Maruna, 2001).

In doing this work, professional exes mobilized their experiences of incarceration as a particular form of coveted capital in this field. This insight parallels Bourdieu’s (1993) understanding of fields of cultural production, which are defined in part by their orientation toward field specific capital (prestige, authenticity, legitimacy)—the reversal of ordinary capital.

Author: Do you think actually physically and emotionally experiencing things first-hand is important in being able to offer advice or be there for someone in these circumstances?

Tamie: It’s the only way. That’s why I’m here. That’s why [the organization] hired me. They know … Everybody knows … It’s the only way […] I’ve been through hell and back … somehow made it back. I don’t know … I feel that I can be really helpful … I guess … Like wanna talk about working the streets? Got it. Wanna talk about depression? Yeah, I got it. Wanna talk about your jerk off abusive boyfriend? Family shit? I got it all.

Professional exes’ experiences of incarceration and prison release were drawn on to help others, simultaneously acting to legitimate their perspectives and field positions. Lived experience not only communicated that professional exes understood the hardships of navigating the criminal justice system, but also signaled their proven ability to transcend these challenges.

Marta: I know what [criminalized women] need because I know what I needed when I came out.

Tamie: […] I know what [service users] are going through cause … you know … like … I’ve been there. I lived through that and look at me now … I made it.

Professional exes nurtured the value of such capital by distancing themselves from others in this field. For example, Paige cautioned against volunteers’ tendency to “dream up magical futures” for criminalized women (fieldnotes December 2017). Instead, she drew on her own experience as a more “realistic” model for other women in disadvantaged social positions:

Paige: (fieldnotes December 2017) [Criminalized] women need role models sure, but we need to give them something realistic … We can’t all have it all you know? When they look at me they know that everything I have they can have too because we started at the same place. […] It’s easy enough to be on the right tracks if that’s where you’ve always been. I know what it’s like to come back from hell and make it […] I can tell [criminalized women] how I did it. I can show them a success story.

Similarly, Marta and Tamie believed their positions gave them an edge over others in the field.

Marta: [Practitioners] do their best … I know this more than anyone, but some of them have never been inside [a prison] so they can only say so much … that’s where I come in.

Tamie: […] look at you (gesturing to Author). I mean no offense, but it’s just different. You’re never gonna know what I do probably … So you’re gonna have a harder time connecting to people […] people actually listen to me cause I know what it’s like. I’ve been there and lived it. […] Yeah I mean I wish I could go back to when I was that age and just have someone sit me down and be like look I know what you’re going through … and I know where you’re headed and you need to stop … cause I’ve been there and it’s not too late.

Other volunteers and practitioners, in professional exes' estimations, were less likely to be able to provide helpful insight given their distance from what women undergo during imprisonment and release.

Without dismissing the value of shared experiences in helping relationships, we must be cautious of how and why this field is increasingly eager to mobilize the expertise of professional exes. Becoming a professional ex was seen as an attractive employment opportunity for ex-prisoners, particularly as their criminal records were barriers to employment (Pager, 2003). These already marginalized individuals may come to serve as vehicles through which responsibilizing discourses, submerged beneath the field-level legitimacy of their lived experience, are transmitted. Over time professional exes may internalize the language, perspective, and goals of the organizations they work for. For example, Marta who envisioned herself as a “posterchild for the organization” (fieldnotes October 2017) drew on discourses of organizational dependency as she underscored the importance of adhering to programming.

Marta: (fieldnotes October 2017) I’m here to show [criminalized women] what can happen when you get on board with what they’re telling you here. [This organization] saved my life.

As a result of such tensions between control and care in this field, the professional ex position, in particular, is in need of further examination. Especially as “peer mentoring schemes are now an increasing feature of the penal landscape” (Buck, 2018: p. 190).

Conclusion

Volunteers, practitioners, and professional exes, although all ostensibly involved in the same goal—helping criminalized women—draw on distinct discursive frames to understand and legitimate their perspectives. There is also developing evidence to suggest that such differences have practical consequences for how criminalized women choose to engage with agents in the field. In other words, how individuals conceptualize the help they provide may impact the kind of relationship that they can develop with criminalized women. We must consider the responses that different styles of helping may call forth from service users. Not all help offered will be equally effective (or even accepted). This is a critical insight for the implementation of the growing number of PVS policies and programs, particularly as their funding increasingly depends upon social impact and service user outcomes. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between (at least) volunteers, practitioners, and professional exes in PVS research, contrast to the use of umbrella terms such as voluntary sector practitioners (e.g. Tomczak and Albertson, 2016) that obscure such distinctions.

This is not to suggest that attention to field positions and their discursive terrain unlocks all the mysteries of the PVS. There are notable limitations to my analysis. In particular, there is a need to carefully examine variation within field positions and permeability across them. For example, analytical distinctions between paid versus volunteer professional exes and/or management versus frontline (service delivery) practitioners may prove to be consequential. Future research may also examine how these discursive struggles play out in practice and press for a richer understanding of how criminalized women are (or perhaps are not) actually helped by PVS intervention. Leaning on the value of “orienting statements” (Goldstone, 2004), this paper’s attention to field positions in the PVS has offered a new perspective in a developing research area and a generative direction with which to align future scholarship.

Footnotes

Authors' Note

Kaitlyn Quinn is now affiliated with the University of Nottingham, UK.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following scholars who read and provided thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Philip Badawy, Tyler Bateman, Shyon Baumann, Miranda Doff, Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson, Vanessa Evans, Fernando Calderon Figueroa, Phil Goodman, Storm Jeffers, Jonathan Kauenhowen, Yoonkyung Lee, Martin Lukk, Mona Lynch, Melissa Milkie, Jason Pagaduan, Shawn Perron, Taylor Price, Paul Pritchard, Ashley Rubin, Gail Super, Erik Schneiderhan, Samia Tecle, and Philippa Tomczak, as well as the anonymous reviewers at Punishment & Society. I am indebted to the women who allowed me observe their work and who shared their experiences for this manuscript.

Funding

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the University of Toronto Department of Sociology.

Notes

Kaitlyn Quinn is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation research investigates the penal voluntary sector in Canada with a focus on criminalized women. She is also a Research Associate at the University of Nottingham, UK in the School of Sociology and Social Policy.

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